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MOTION PICTURE EXHIBITORS' ASSOCIATION 617
In some instances they believed that they had been forced to pay unreasonably high prices for pictures. The Independent Motion Picture Exhibitors' Association, Incorporated, therefore, had been organized under the leadership of an experienced organizer of cooperative selling associations with the objective of combining sufficient buying power to enable the association to buy highquality pictures for first runs.
Loew's, Incorporated, which owned the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corporation, a large producer of motion pictures, operated 52 theaters3 in Metropolitan New York. Several of this company's theaters were located in the shopping area of New York City and the remainder formed a network of neighborhood theaters. The Keith-Albee Orpheum Circuit operated 30 theaters in Metropolitan New York, most of which showed both vaudeville and motion pictures. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corporation sold most of its pictures each year to the theaters of Loew's, Incorporated, for first runs and then to other theaters. Other large producers of motion pictures preferred to sell first to the theaters of the Keith-Albee Orpheum Circuit or of Loew's, Incorporated, and to the individual theaters later, because of the larger purchases made by the theater chains. In New York City the theaters operated by Loew's, Incorporated, and those operated by the Keith-Albee Orpheum Circuit required a sufficient variety of pictures in a year to permit these chains to buy most of the pictures of the leading producers. These two competing chains, with the exception of a few theaters, never showed the same pictures. The exceptions were the lower class theaters of Loew's, Incorporated, which changed their programs every day and thus needed more pictures than those purchased for the better class theaters in the chain. These daily-change theaters bought pictures that had been shown in theaters operated by the KeithAlbee Orpheum Circuit.
There was considerable competition among producers in selling their pictures to the chain theaters. A chain of theaters, such as the one operated by the Keith-Albee Orpheum Circuit, when making its purchases demanded that it be permitted to show the pictures on a first run and usually required that all its theaters, whether they were first-run houses or not, be protected against any showing by a theater outside the chain until the pictures had
3 Film Daily Yearbook, 1928.